Monday, April 25, 2016

Cruz grovels while Trump campaigns

Now that they both are mathematically eliminated from winning the 2016 nomination, Kasich and Cruz are teaming up to try to stop Trump. Cruz wil campaign in Indiana, and Kasich will take on New Mexico and Oregon. I guess voters have no say in this. Meanwhile, five states with a total of 172 delegates vote on Tuesday, and it looks like Kasich and Cruz won't campaign in any of them.

But I thought they stopped Trump in Wisconsin.
Remember?

In Wisconsin, Reince Priebus and the rest of the Republican Establishment did a great job in kneecapping the party's presumptive nominee. Scott Walker became the first Republican governor whose endorsement meant a damned thing this primary season as his man, Cruz, got 48% of the vote and 36 of the 42 delegates. Trump got 6.

Then came Colorado. The state party handed Cruz got 34 of 37 delegates -- and Trump the nomination.

The Colorado state party did this without the support of the rank-and-file. Party officials made sure Cruz won, and tweeted afterward: “We did it. #NeverTrump.”

After Matt Drudge exposed that tweet, the party deleted it, and officials said they were hacked.

How utterly Anthony Weiner of them.

The tide turned. Trump protested the Colorado decision in an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal. Whatever momentum Cruz told himself he had disappeared. Then came New York where the voters schlonged him. Cruz went oh-for-95. That meant that since Rubio dropped out, Trump won 149 delegates, Cruz won 87, and Kasich won 5. That's in actual primaries, not the gifts from party hacks.

This week, Trump was all over the place, including Hagerstown, Maryland, which is just outside West Virginia. Where was Cruz? For part of the week he was in Hollywood, Florida, groveling before 250 Cleveland delegates for their votes on the second or third ballot, as he continued to hope for that a monkey wrench would jam Trump's political machine.

Cruz spent most of Wednesday afternoon hosting a series of small-group meetings, with 10 to 15 state chairmen and RNC members. Kasich came the same day, and both addressed RNC members that evening.

Trump himself didn’t show. (A fact that both the Cruz and Kasich camps seized upon. “There’s just no substitute for being there in person,” said Cruz adviser Ken Cuccinelli. “There just isn’t.”) But he sent many of his team’s political advisers, including newly installed campaign leaders Paul Manafort and Rick Wiley, newly hired adviser William McGinley, longtime adviser Alan Cobb, and top attorney Don McGahn.

RNC members received a private Trump briefing on Thursday evening led by Manafort, as waiters circulated with seafood platters of crab legs, shrimp cocktails and oysters.

The event amounted to an audition before a skeptical audience for his new campaign team, especially after Trump has blasted the GOP nominating process repeatedly as “rigged.” It also represented a coming-out party of sorts for Wiley, Trump’s new political director and a former RNC political director.

"Rick Wiley’s popular,” said Steel, the California committeeman. "He’s understood to be a serious addition to the Trump team."

Trump is well on his way to wining the nomination.

The whining from butt-hurt pundits is amusing. They are insisting that Trump -- and only Trump -- needs 1,237 delegates or more to win, otherwise it goes to Cruz. The public ain't buying it.From Nate Silver:

Polling suggests that a majority of Republicans agree with at least the milder version of Trump’s argument, although the framing of the question matters. Last week’s NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll found that 62 percent of Republicans thought the “candidate with the most votes in the primaries” should become the nominee in the event that no candidate wins a majority of delegates, compared with 33 percent who said Republicans should choose the “candidate who the delegates think would be the best nominee.”

Only 40 percent of Republicans had Trump as their first choice in the same poll, which implies that there’s a group of Republicans who personally don’t prefer Trump but wouldn’t want to deny him the nomination if he finished with the plurality of delegates and votes, as he is almost certain to do. We might call this group the #TolerateTrump faction of the GOP, as opposed to pro-Trump and #NeverTrump blocs.

Polls like those could sway delegate sentiment at the convention. But let’s not get too far ahead of ourselves; there are still 15 states where voters have yet to weigh in.

As Republican front-runner Donald Trump has led the delegate chase, he has complained that the “corrupt and crooked” elections have been “rigged” against him.

But he has repeatedly failed to prove his case that states have stacked the deck against him.

Trump has received a plurality of delegates so far, but he hasn’t yet hit a majority, which is 1,237. It’s that process of delegate selection that has fueled many of his complaints.

We have fact-checked three claims by Trump or his campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski, related to delegate selection or the primary voting system. Two of the claims were about Florida’s March 15 primary, while the third pertains to the Colorado caucus and state convention. We rated all three statements False on the Truth-O-Meter.

Trump cleverly turned the tables against Ted Cruz in regard to the nationwide delegate fight, especially in Colorado. Trump outflanked Cruz. By calling the delegate-selection process "rigged," and arguing that Colorado had an election without voters, Trump turned a loss into a victory. Why? Because he put Cruz in the unenviable position of defending the status quo delegate-selection process.

Now, Cruz played by the rules in Colorado and elsewhere. And Trump was caught flat-footed, and to some extent was embarrassed by his own weak delegate-gathering team. However, and this is the key point, Cruz argued time and again that the rules were the rules and that he simply played by them. And as Trump continuously attacked the RNC rules as being undemocratic, disenfranchising to voters, and creatures of out-of-touch Republican-party regulars, he put Cruz in the position of backing the establishment. A bad place for Cruz.

In very clear terms, Trump connected Cruz with exactly those establishmentarian elites who have bred so much anger and resentment in Republicans everywhere. Trump completely outflanked Cruz while turning a process issue into a policy issue.

This is not that difficult to figure out. They greased the skids for Cruz and then claimed he is better organized. But while Cruz was fixing it so that on the third ballot, Trump got more delegates who will vote for him, Before New York, I also said he is well on his way to winning on the first ballot.

Last weekend they thought they were so clever in Colorado.

Now they boo-hoo that Trump is mean for saying Cruz rigged the vote. You lie with sheep, don't be surprised if Donald Trump says in the morning you've got sheep's breath.

The 'alliance' is an opportunity for Cruz to not appear as finishing 3rd in the western states . . .and not come in 3rd in Indiana to Kasich, who is out of the race in that state -- because of the 'alliance.'V/R,Gary S

FAKE NEWS FOLLIES OF 2017

Total Pageviews

Followers

Blog Archive

About Me

I live in Poca, West Virginia, with my lovely wife of 40 years, Lou Ann. I am an Army veteran and Cleveland State graduate. I retired after 40 years as a newspaperman. In 2016, I published "Trump the Press," which drew rave reviews at Power Line and Instapundit.